Limitations

Fledge checks what can be checked mechanically and says when it cannot decide. This page collects what it does not cover, so the step-by-step guides can stay direct. No Fledge result guarantees that a venue will accept a submission.

Platforms and tools

  • macOS is the tested platform. Builds, Biber, multi-document packages and a corpus of realistic projects pass live on the macOS development host.

  • The macOS installer’s Homebrew and MacTeX steps are tested with controlled commands and dry runs, not with a live installation.

  • Linux needs a manual installation and Bubblewrap with working user namespaces. Its sandbox has controlled-command tests but has not run on a live Linux host.

  • Windows has no build sandbox, so check and prepare cannot build there. inspect and bib check need only Python. To build on Windows, use WSL 2 with the Linux instructions in installation; that route carries the Linux caveat above and is not yet validated on a live host.

  • No unsandboxed fallback exists. If the sandbox cannot start, for example inside another sandbox or under a restrictive host policy, builds are blocked.

  • Optional qpdf and MuPDF checks are tested against recorded tool output, not against the live tools. If either tool is missing, its checks are reported as incomplete.

Venue rules

Fledge maintains no publisher, venue or year profiles. Page limits, page sizes, required classes, identity terms and similar policies come from you. The presets (arxiv, anonymous-review, camera-ready) switch on generic checks and leave venue values as placeholders; they are starting points, not certified policies. Read the venue’s current instructions and configure what they require.

Questions that need human judgment

These questions need a person, even when a related check passes:

  • whether declarations (ethics, data availability, AI use) are adequate and accurate; Fledge checks only that a required section is present and nonempty;

  • whether a submission is anonymous; identity checks find only the terms and hints you configure;

  • whether figures and the PDF are accessible; alternate-text and tag checks do not establish description quality, reading order or PDF/UA conformance;

  • whether the scientific content, citations and wording are right; Fledge never rewrites them.

Source and PDF coverage

  • The source scanner understands literal TeX commands, not arbitrary macros. Dynamic file paths, font-family lookup and legacy subfiles preamble behavior are unsupported; flattening stops instead of guessing.

  • Build entry filenames must use ASCII letters, digits, underscores, dots or hyphens and end in .tex. Source analysis requires UTF-8 text.

  • PDF comparison checks page count, extracted text and 144-DPI renders. Details below that resolution and differences inside PDF internals can go unnoticed. Rendering stops at 300 pages.

  • HTML captures at most eight affected page pairs and 12 MiB of PNG data. Visual previews explain recorded differences, not every page or PDF object.

  • Submission-text export supports literal declarations and common formatting. Custom macros, citations, references and complex math remain unresolved and require manual conversion; no TeX macro expansion is attempted.

  • Drawing checks handle a limited subset of PDF graphics; curves, complex clips, masks, OCR and automatic figure segmentation are not covered.

  • Online checks depend on the services’ current data. Their tests use simulated responses, so provider availability and coverage are not verified.

Not yet implemented

Image optimization, externalized-figure preparation, annotated PDF output, Windows isolation and a web interface. The check backlog separates partial implementations, missing validation and intentional exclusions in detail.